Friday, January 30, 2004

Now They Tell Us If, in the past, you have heard liberals ranting about the press thought they sounded like certifiable paranoiacs, I wouldn't blame you. God knows I've thought it. So, just in case that happens again, let's both bookmark this post so so that we can come back and remind ourselves what really happened between Iowa and New Hampshire. Diane Sawyer herself tells us that the media mislead the primary voters about the nature of Dean's post-caucus Iowa speech, that realized what they were doing, and that they did nothing about it. Please not that Sawyer waited until two days after the NH primary to tell us this. After my interview with Dean and his wife in which I played the tape again -- in fact played it to them -- I noticed that on that tape he's holding a hand-held microphone. One designed to filter out the background noise. It isolates your voice, just like it does to Charlie Gibson and me when we have big crowds in the morning. The crowds are deafening to us standing there But the viewer at home hears only our voice. So, we collected some other tapes from Dean's speech including one from a documentary filmmaker, tapes that do carry the sound of the crowd, not just the microphone he held on stage. We also asked the reporters who were there to help us replicate what they experienced in the room. Reena Singh, ABC News Dean campaign reporter: "What the cameras didn't capture was the crowd." Garance Franke-Ruta, Senior Editor, American Prospect: "As he spoke, the audience got louder and louder and I found it somewhat difficult to hear him." Dean's boisterous countdown of the upcoming primaries as we all heard it on TV was isolated, when in fact he was shouting over the roaring crowd. And what about the scream as we all heard it? In the room, the so-called scream couldn't really be heard at all. Again, he was yelling along with the crowd. As the saying goes: "But am I paranoid enough"? 9:26:43 PM    comment []trackback []

David Kay Watching the interview with David Kay on The Newshour last night, I found impossible not to like David Kay. He was self-effacing, and seemed honest in his surprise at not finding any WMD. Any thoughts that he might be an administration lapdog were dismissed by his unambiguous support for an outside, independant investigation, an investigation that the White House is trying to avoid. JIM LEHRER: You also in your back and forth with Senator McCain yesterday, you said -- and I mentioned in the news summary -- that you are now in favor of an outside investigation of the intelligence failures on Iraq. The White House says no; Condoleezza Rice said no, no, no, no, the inspections are not even over yet. It's too early to talk about that. Does that make sense to you, the White House position? DAVID KAY: It really doesn't. In some ways I'm brought back to Apollo 13 in which the response was Houston we have a problem and if the response back from Houston had been, well, ride it out, we'll see how serious it is when you get to the Moon. I think we know enough to know we have a problem and now is the time to start the investigation. My reason for believing it has to be outside -- there are many variations of how you can do it outside -- is my reading on history is that closed orders and secret societies, whether they are private, religious or governmental, do not reform themselves internally very often. 6:49:29 AM    comment []trackback []